Is IIS balancing reliable for WCF servers?

Question

I have to create WCF servers farm (several workstations in Intranet environment that host WCF servers) and wonder how to implement load balancing.

Requirements are:

• If workstation is down requests should be automatically redirected to another one
• The workstation with minimum request processing time should be chosen to handle incoming request

Questions are:

• Do IIS servers with NLB (that will host my WCF servers) meet my requirement?
• Can I use more compressed protocol than http to minimize traffic and still live with IIS?

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

NLB will be fine, however, if you use a session based binding (wsHttpBinding or netTcpBinding_ then you have to enable sticky sessions

If you want full free load balancing then HTTP is the way to go and make sure you don;t have sessions. For lowest overhead use HTTP with the binary encoder (this requires a custom binding although it has been packaged by a number of people - search for NetHttpBinding)